Building Cyber Infrastructure for Geochronology: A Case Study in Collaborative Software Engineering Research

The Cyber Infrastructure Research and Development Lab for the Earth Sciences (CIRDLES) collaboratively integrates domain-specific software engineering with the efforts of two NSF-supported initiatives in geochronology. Geochronology is the science of determining the age of geological formations. The EARTHTIME initiative pursues consensus-based approaches to geochemical data reduction, and the EarthChem initiative pursues the creation of data repositories for all geochemical data. CIRDLES provides software engineering infrastructure to support the development of software and systems that serve as the cyber infrastructure for geochronology. This collaboration benefits the earth sciences by enabling geochemists to focus on their specialties using robust software that produces reliable results. This collaboration benefits software engineering by providing research opportunities to improve process methodologies used in the design and implementation of domain-specific solutions. Finally, this collaboration benefits the teaching efforts of both software engineers and geochemists by producing tangible, open-source artifacts for students to use. CIRDLES is an example of how research in collaborative software engineering can expand to include collaboration with other sciences and domains.